TREES
2017-2021
Having roamed the industrial areas of the UAE for close to 20 years, Arnaud Rivieren has been able to witness the fast-paced industrialization of the region, where new industries continuously emerge and with them, the need for resources and materials. This in turn created an abundance of discarded materials that were destined to be destroyed and judged as ‘not satisfying enough’ for the industrial processes they were meant to go through, an ecological disaster that the region seems to brush off, due to the youth of its industries.
Arnaud Rivieren had then decided to collect some of the industrial waste laid to rest in scrapyards, such as steel sheets and breams, to provide the materials for his ‘Trees’. Once collected, they go through an intense process of remodeling and refinishing that involves highly skilled steel crafting techniques, creating a polished and ready-made effect. He then divides the newly refurbished metal into 20 to 35 detachables that will be further assembled to make one of his trees.
The trees are modelled after different species that are endemic to the flora of the UAE, creating a duality in the meaning of the series, while the artworks can be seen as a commentary on the uncontrolled industrialization of the region as well as the effects of it on the precious and fragile local wildlife. It is also a love letter to this existence, one that is often forgotten because of its rarity in the unforgiving desertic climate.
VEGETAL - FRUITS AND VEGETABLES
2021
In this series, Arnaud Rivieren sublimates and expands common agricultural produce, creating new natural shapes in a spirit of expansion and enlargement. These works are first skeletonized by the Artist creating the rigidity and the overall shape, before being meticulously soldering and shaping metal sheets around the hull of the artwork. Finishing up by extensively polishing these panels, removing any seams that might be left from the attachment process, and creating the final shape through expertly acquired steel forming techniques.
Connecting the idea of industry and nature, the Artist expresses the reality around him through his most personal language, the one of metal.
RADICAL BARRELS
2017-2021
An ongoing series Barrels started in 2017 when he came across an accumulation of used barrels previously utilized in various industrial fields such as petrochemical, agriculture, perfume and oil. Through the external colors of the barrels the artist was able to identify their previous function. The barrels were flattened and framed manipulating a hollow practical container and molding it into a flat colored surface resembling the appeal of abstract or minimal monochromatic paintings.
In the latest reworkings of these disused barrels Rivieren cuts up the circular base of several barrels and opens them completely to simply weld them on these compartments, evolving from a three-dimensional volume into a two dimensional one, the cylinder becomes a rectangle.
Whilst using the colored flat leftovers as companions to one another creating sets of two or more bright rectangular steel sheets, contradicting or complimenting each other.
Symbolically these works unveil the many lifecycles, a single barrel can undertake through innovative and environmentally conscious human intervention of reshaping the appearance and function of what is essentially a mundane object.
Connected to the radical concept of Buren and Mosset, rooted in sequential colors and minimal intervention, this work uses the idea of the standardized industrial barrel colors to reduce the intervention of the artist to the spatial plane only.
MINERAL STONES
2018-2019
In this series, Rivieren transforms stainless steel scraps into forms that defy their material rigidity and industrial origins. Using cast-off material sourced from Jebel Ali, Rivieren’s sculptures are created in a ‘moment of inertia’: he heats steel until it begins to bend, as the viewer walks around these sculptures, curved steel sheets align and interact – creating naturalistic terrestrial forms when viewed from different angles.
This work is often modelled after smaller real stones the Artist has collected in the deserts of the UAE, expanding them to a size which highlights the intricacies of these common minerals, and connecting the idea of their natural rigidity with the industrial toughness of industrialized materials.
EGGS
2008
For his work on the egg, Rivieren tries to add a touch of sublimation to the origin of all life, even human. This work is intimately linked to nature and tries to bring focus onto something so common yet so intricate and expertly designed through eons of evolution. The shape of the egg is especially hard to get right and would pose a real challenge to any artist to recreate. This work features a stainless-steel skeleton on which Rivieren proceeded to weld metal panels on, before polishing them to give this smooth and seamless appearance while avoiding an effect which would be too ‘’mirrory’’.